AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, has again lied to the Australian people. In an effort to position modern terrorism effecting Australia before Australia’s involvement in the invasion, and the resulting fiasco that is the occupation or Iraq, he has stated that because the Bali bombings happened before the invasion of Iraq, Australia’s involvement could not have been the reason why Australians were targeted at Bali.[1] This is an utter deceit.

The deceit is compounded by the way Howard attempts to reinforce this proposition by suggesting that the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 1993 and the subsequent attacks on the WTC on 9/11 were also proof that ‘terrorists’ were targeting Australia by virtue of Australia being a close ally of the US – before Australia’s involvement in Iraq.

First, while the Bali bombings of October 2002 indeed were before the invasion of Iraq, it was only just. It was well known where Howard, despite his denials, stood with regard to Australia’s forthcoming involvement with the US in Iraq. Certainly all Australians did – at the time there were massive demonstrations in Australia imploring Howard not to allow Australia to become involved.

Secondly, to suggest that Australia in 1993 at the time of the first attack on the WTC was closer as an ally to the US than any other nation around the globe thus rendering us as targets now because we are ‘western’ is also a deceit.

The reality that Howard can’t accept is that his personal alliance with Bush – not just Australia’s alliance with the US – has put Australia firmly on the so-called terrorists’ map. Howard’s suggestion that Australia is targeted simply because we are a ‘western’ nation is a lie.

Howard is also attempting to perpetuate the lie that he only knew what the US intelligence people were telling him about Iraq’s WMDs. He says: “Some of the intelligence agencies that were involved in this assessment were telling us, telling the administration and through them, us and our intelligence agencies, that Iraq in 2003 had weapons of mass destruction.” True, but some of the other intelligence agencies, including some of our own,[2] were telling a different story which Howard chose not to listen to.

The Lying Tyrant Howard can spin it whatever way he wants but when it comes time to write the history of the Howard era he’ll find that historians will soon reveal his dishonesty and deceit .

ENDNOTE[1] AAP, ‘Howard welcomes declassified material’, The Australian, 27 September 2006. Available online: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20484551-601,00.html Accessed 27 September 2006.[2] See Andrew Wilkie, Axis of Deceit: The story of the intelligence officer who risked all to tell the truth about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq, (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2004.)

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, has been fed the line from the US and now he now feeds it on to the Australian people, i.e., that the US has offered Iran room to negotiate over the question of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.[1] Since most clear thinking commentators are aware of the fact that the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), the nuclear energy watchdog organisation that is monitoring Irans nuclear program, has stated that there has been no evidence to suggest that Iran wishes to enrich uranium beyond that which could be used for peaceful power generation, we can be assured that US concerns for Iran’s ‘nuclear program’ is merely a ruse by which a carefully implemented public opinion campaign against Iran can be orchestrated. Downers line is simply part of that orchestration whereby the allies wish to be seen as being ‘reasonable’ and offering ‘every opportunity’ to Iran and then, when Iran insists it’s not doing anything wrong and will continue with its enrichment program for power generation, the allies can then say the Iranians have refused ‘every opportunity’ and are not being ‘reasonable’ – and then attack them.

The reality is that US and allied Special Forces are already operating inside Iran. At a private dinner some weeks ago with three members of Australia’s rural industries, Prime Minister John Howard let it slip that Australian Special Forces were indeed already inside Iran preparing the groundwork for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the impression was that Howard was actually bragging about it in terms of how good Aussie Special Forces are.[2]

What most people are failing to understand is that the stand-off between Iran and the US-Israel has absolutely nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear ambitions and everything to do with regional hegemony and Israeli security and Zionist expansionism. We’ve already witnessed recent but failed attempts by the US and Israel to draw Iran into the Lebanon conflict. Now the western forces are rallying again to muster public opinion in preparation for an attack on Iran.

It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter simply of when.

ENDNOTES[1] David Nason, ‘Softer stance may allow talks with Iran’, The Australian, 23 September 2006. Available online: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20461607-2703,00.html Accessed 24 September 2006.[2] This information was passed anonymously and incidentally to me from a person who did not know me and who had no reason to be dishonest with me and who told me he was an employee of one of the persons that was at this private dinner.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

A rift seems to have developed in relations between Pakistan and the US. Pakistan’s President, General Pervez Musharraf, has claimed that the US threatened to ‘nuke Pakistan into the stone-age’ if it didn’t co-operate with the US in the aftermath of 11 September 2001.[1]

But one needs to ask whether it really was the threat of being ‘nuked into the stone-age’ that brought President Musharraf to heel so quickly after the events of 11 September 2006, or more the ex-gratia payment of $50 million, authorised on 28 September 2001,[2] that ensured that Pakistan was kept on side.

Musharraf is an extremely clever politician who is adept at walking the fine and often tight line between Pakistan’s Islamic world to which most of its peoples belong, and the western world to which Musharraf has allied his nation in the Global War on Terrorism. Money and power are two commodities that seem to reign supreme for Musharraf when it comes to walking that fine tight line.

A survivor of numerous coup attempts, a method Musharraf himself favours to gain power, and assassination attempts, he hangs on to his power as every good dictator does; granting plenty of favours to other powerful people and bribery. Sometimes those granting of favours conflicts with the interests of his western allies but he is always forgiven by them because they know that Musharraf only ever does anything because it is in his interests to do so and keeping on side with his western allies is the only way that Musharraf is able to cling to his power.

It is for this reason that Musharraf has made the remarks about being threatened by the US in the aftermath of 9/11. And it is for this reason that he will get away with making these remarks without upsetting his relationship with the Bush administration too much. Such remarks are designed to keep on side with the Islamic world of Pakistan. Musharraf’s allies in the West know how important this rhetoric is to a leader in his precarious position.

The US could very well ‘nuke Pakistan into the stone-age’ but the US is also very much aware of the fact that Pakistan is the only nuclear armed Islamic nation in the world with a capability to strike back.

I doubt Pakistan was threatened to be nuked back into the stone-age.

I think the $50 million dollars paid to Pakistan, the first no doubt of many such payments, had far more to do with keeping Musharraf on side – right from the beginning. I also think that many of Musharraf’s minions were, and still are, up to their necks in perpetuating the myth of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the intrigue and subterfuge that became 9/11 – with a lot of help from the US taxpayer.

Monday, September 11, 2006

In his interview yesterday with Tim Russert on the NBC News ‘Meet the Press’ show, Vice-President Dick Cheney gave one of the clearest examples of the definition of classic ‘Chutzpah’ yet. He told his audience that if the US had not removed Saddam Hussein then he, Saddam, “…would be sitting on top of a big pile of cash because he would have $65 and $70 oil.”[1]

Que??!! Is not the reason oil is at $65 and $70 now because of the turmoil that exists in the Middle East as a direct result of removing Saddam Hussein in the first place?

Now that’s what you call “Chutzpah”!

But, of course, the Chutzpah doesn’t end there. There is a certain irony in the fact that as a direct result of ousting Saddam Hussein the only people that are sitting on top of big piles of cash are the big US-owned oil companies and the oil industries service providers like, well, Cheney’s old company Haliburton.

Friday, September 08, 2006

It’s good to see at long last that the mainstream media (MSM) are beginning to publish articles about the so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ that surround the events of 9/11 – even if they are in an attempt to debunk them. It means that if the MSM is going to so much trouble to debunk them then the truth about what really happened that fateful day is finally beginning to emerge into the public domain and that the western governments who have an interest in maintaining the façade of the ‘official version’ of events are becoming worried that their story is coming apart at the seams.

Of course, the present spate of articles in the MSM are designed to reinforce the statements that President Bush recently made when trying to shore up his support for the continued ‘war against terror’.[1]

In one recent article in the UK Telegraph by Michael Shelden one can almost sense the desperation in his narrative as he tries to dissuade readers from believing the claims of Dr. Steven E. Jones, the university physics professor from Utah who is a leading light in the 9/11 Scholars for Truth movement, that the twin towers of the World Trade Center could not have collapsed solely because aircraft had crashed in to them and that, therefore, there must have been some kind of conspiracy involved in order that a secondary cause for the towers collapse could be effected. Shelden doesn’t attempt to debunk Jones’ assertion but, instead, tries to belittle Jones by referring to some of Jones’ other non-related theories about religious characters in Mexican history, etc.[2]

Then there is Alexander Cockburn’s attempt to do a similar job on Dr. David Ray Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor.[3] Cockburn in his piece in The Nation attempts to frame Griffin’s synopsis of what happened on 9/11 within the notion that Griffin has a “…devout, almost preposterous belief in American efficiency”, inadvertently inferring that it was American inefficiency that allowed the attacks to happen.[4]

Meanwhile, Abraham H. Foxman of the pro right-wing Zionist Anti-Defamation League writes, predictably, in the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California that conspiracy theories about 9/11 are anti-Semitic. He bases this assertion on the fact that it was reported that many Israeli employees at the WTC did not attend work that day because they had been warned of the possibility of an attack. “This outrageous lie”, Foxman says, “took off like wildfire and became the centerpiece of the conspiracy theory that is accepted by millions of people in the Islamic world, and others around the globe, that it was Israel and the Jews, not al Qaida, that perpetrated the terrorist event of Sept. 11, 2001.”[5] We need, so Foxman seems to think, to know this because not only have millions of people in the Islamic world got a few doubts about the official version of events but now so have millions of people throughout the western world and, indeed, in growing numbers across the US. The latest figures show that over a third of Americans now believe that there is a lot more to the 9/11 story than the official government version would have us believe as the new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll shows.[6]

The governments of the coalition of the willing and their compliant and supportive mainstream media are getting worried. We can expect to see a lot more of these types of articles appearing in the MSM trying desperately to debunk so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ and, of course, the more they try then the more likelihood there is that people that were previously not interested in conspiracy theories and were content with the official version will now be wondering if there isn’t something in these stories after all!

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Back in February of this year I asked if Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard, in collusion with the Australian Federal Police (AFP), had the Australian drug traffickers known as the Bali Nine, deliberately set up so that they could be arrested, tried and sentenced to death by Indonesian courts.[1] I noted that the reason Howard and the AFP did this was specifically for the express purpose of deterring Australian drug smugglers from going to Indonesia in order to bring drugs back into Australia.Australia no longer has a death penalty and has never had one for drug trafficking. Indeed, Australia’s sentencing history on drug traffickers is nowhere near as harsh as those of Indonesia.Two of the Bali Nine, the ringleaders, were eventually sentenced to death while all of the others got lengthy jail terms including life imprisonment which in Indonesia usually does mean ‘life’. As a result of these harsh sentences all but one of the Bali Nine, one that had been sentenced to a comparatively lenient twenty years, appealed their sentences. Since all were caught literally red handed smuggling heroin, none of them were in any position to appeal against their convictions – only their sentences. Yesterday the results of those appeals were revealed and they shocked Australia. Instead of having their sentences reduced, the two that were sentenced to death had there sentence upheld while four others that had received lengthy prison terms will now have to face the death penalty. The other two that had appealed will serve life sentences.The point is, however, that these people would not have to be facing the death penalty if the AFP, who had known of the Bali Nine’s plans to smuggle drugs into Australia from Bali, had arrested them in Australia. Instead, the AFP opted for informing the Indonesian authorities and did so in the full knowledge that Indonesia has the death penalty for drug trafficking. Furthermore, not only was the AFP aware of Indonesia’s harsh penalties for drug trafficking but it was also aware that the Indonesian government were having a major crack down on drug trafficking by making full use of the harsh penalties, including the death sentence, on offenders and, in particular, foreigners.Just as Howard exposed his hypocrisy about the issue of the death sentence when he received news of the original sentences, so yet again he has shown himself to be unmoved by the plight of those sentenced to death reasserting only that Australian policy with regard to the death sentence and that if people are silly enough to get involved with drugs then there is little sympathy from him other than to formally apply to the Indonesians for a commutation of the sentence but even then not to expect too much.[2]There is little doubt that Howard and the AFP deliberately set up the Bali Nine to be caught red handed in Bali in order that they serve as a deterrent to those who aspire to bring drugs into Australia. Howard and the AFP in making the decision to allow the Bali Nine to go ahead with their plans have deliberately sentenced these people to death by proxy.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

There seems to be one or two people at Webdiary who are completely unable to understand what the Iraq war has been all about. The one commentator there that has any sense of what it really is all about is Roslyn Ross.Ross argues:

“The US has acted in ways in Iraq which are either utterly and completely incompetent or designed to create as much chaos as possible and tip the country into civil war or a semblance of civil war.The litany of 'errors' or maybe not errors committed by the US in the handling of its invasion and occupation are legion. Either they are thoroughly incompetent, and that is certainly possible, or the 'plan' was to make Iraq so unstable that an occupying presence could be justified in the long term.” Ross goes on to assert: “…an army plan to divide Iraq – remember the line divide and conquer – was seen as the best way to control the region.”[1]

Ross is correct in her assumption; the name of the game is indeed divide and rule. Shortly after the war got under way John Howard inadvertently let the cat out of the bag when he said that there “…may well be a case for a federation, with the Kurdish elements, the Sunni and the Shia.”[2] Fortunately, for Howard anyway, nobody paid much attention. Nonetheless, it’s certainly looking as though that may well be the only alternative. It certainly would be the one that would best suit the coalition because it would then allow the US to remain in Iraq at the behest of any one of the three groupings that would form such a federation – the Kurds, the Shia’s and the Sunni’s.

The US has no intention of leaving Iraq and certainly not at any time soon. Ross is right. The Americans have built up an infrastructure within Iraq that is designed specifically for the long term. The US government has no interest in what the world thinks of its role in Iraq. The methods used to gain its foothold of hegemony is fait accompli and the US has set up a very sophisticated propaganda machine that is able – at least so far – to have just been able to keep on top of the worlds negative public opinion over the current state of affairs in Iraq.

Hamish Alcorn has demonstrated yet again his childish naiveté and knowledge of Middle East affairs when he states thus: “….a f**k up it is in Iraq, from the beginning, and yeah, there's been lies and cover-ups all along too, mostly from the hip otherwise they wouldn't have been so clumsy and obvious. Let's keep exposing these as we spot them. But a grand conspiracy to f**k up on purpose? I really don't think so. For me it was clear that it was merely a f**k up when they did not find WMDs, despite everything riding on it politically.”[3] The statement is, of course, an absurdity. How can one ‘f**k up' not finding WMDs if one knew they didn’t exist in the first place and stating that they did was merely lie to create a casus belli to invade Iraq? There now exists plenty of evidence to suggest that the entire war was based exclusively on deliberately constructed lies designed to gain the support of US public opinion. There is even now a massive 36% of the American people who now suspect “…that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.”[4]

The real aims of US Middle East foreign policy have nowhere near been met. The three main aims are to project US hegemony to the region, to secure, at least, influence over the natural resources of the region and to secure the interests and long term goals of Israel – and each and all of these aims are mutually contingent upon the other.

The entire project of bringing Israeli/US dominance into the Middle East has been planned by an alliance of Jewish-American neoconservatives who have Israeli interests as a priority in their policy plans, and non-Jewish American neoconservative pragmatists who have as their priorities the energy and economic interests that can be derived from a successful alliance of US-Israeli foreign policy in the Middle East. Part of that policy is to maintain a major foothold in Iraq for the long term by whatever means is most convenient given any set of international/regional/domestic prevailing agential conditions at any given time. For the Israelis and their pro right-wing Zionist neoconservative allies both in the US and around the world, the aim is to create a Greater Israel that is inclusive of an at least pacified West Bank, but preferably with a non-existent Palestinian population, and a similarly Palestinian-less Gaza Strip. A pacified and powerless Syria would allow Israel to maintain control of the Golan Heights and may even allow the Israelis to yet again think about including south Lebanon up to the Litani River as part of a Greater Israel particularly if Hizbollah were neutralised.

Much of this, of course, very much depends on a subdued and ineffectual Iraq and a toothless or even benign Iran.

For any one to believe that the US has simply blundered ahead with plans for the Middle East that have not been thought out is a really big mistake.

Monday, September 04, 2006

The egotistic liar Hamish Alcorn of Webdiary threw a tantrum a few days ago which many thought and hoped would see the back of him from that blog. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. No sooner had he said ‘goodbye’, accompanied by a reasonable amount of childish foul language that reflected his frustrated ‘no one is listening to me’ cry for attention, than he was back eating only a very small amount of humble pie and claiming that he was back by popular demand.

Webdiary would have benefited greatly from the liar Alcorn’s departure from it. Webdiarists may have had the opportunity to open up discussion of various aspects of history that he had closed down; like alternative ideas relating to the events of 11 September 2001, ideas that are now gaining momentum within the mainstream press which are now seriously questioning, albeit somewhat tentatively at the moment, the ‘official government version’ of what happened on ‘9/11’.

Alcorn came to prominence within Webdiary when his sister, Margo Kingston, the founder and originator of Webdiary, left it through ill-health. It was at this point that Alcorn as a liar was exposed. The details can be found elsewhere on this blog.[1] Basically, Alcorn denied on Webdiary that there had been any threats to Margo Kingston when in fact, Alcorn had told both me and Sid Walker personally by email that there had been and that these threats were from ‘very powerful people’ inferring that they were from Zionists within the Australian ‘Israeli Lobby’. It was at that point that Hamish Alcorn lost all credibility as far as I and a few others were concerned. I stopped posting there and vowed never to return while the liar Alcorn had any semblance of control over Webdiary.

Margo Kingston, when she made the break from Fairfax to go out on her own, made it quite clear that she needed those right-wing commentators that posted regularly at WebDiary to move with her to her new site to make it viable. This they did together with quite a large following of other commentators that had used Webdiary at Fairfax. It did not take too long however, before the right-wing got uppity about the power the left wing posters were seemingly having at the new Webdiary particularly in relation to views about the Holocaust and also in relation to so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ especially those that discussed the events of 9/11. Some right-wing posters threatened to desert Webdiary if such discussion continued. Discussion of this soon became off limits. Webdiary, whether they wanted to or not, had caved in to the right-wing for what turned out to be purely commercial – not political – reasons.

In his latest spat Hamish Alcorn has shown himself to be an egotistical manipulator (nothing new there). He has also demonstrated his inability to think laterally and has shown his willingness to be himself manipulated by the mainstream western propaganda press. He has fallen for the latest garbage about Muslim fundamentalists being ‘Islamofascists’. Alcorn, like most others that have been sucked in by this latest rhetoric from those that are themselves displaying fascist tendencies, clearly has no idea what fascism actually is. Alcorn also has problems distinguishing what is ‘left-wing’ and what isn’t. I, for example, have always argued that not all that proclaims to be ‘left-wing’ or have been commonly been held up as being ‘left-wing’, such as Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, is actually ‘left-wing’. Both of these totalitarian dictators, in my view were exactly the sort of people that gave ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ a bad name! They stopped, as soon as they became totalitarian dictators, being left-wing and became right-wing despite the fact that they wished to continue seeing and proclaiming themselves as ‘left-wing’. Alcorn is too narrow-minded to be able to see this view.

These are all things I am happy to debate but the problem with Alcorn is that he is unwilling to debate anything that falls outside the square of his comfort zone – like discussion on 9/11. He won’t allow discussion on that because the rule has already been set. But it seems that anything else he disagrees with but can’t shut down on, he simply throws a very childish bluey especially when those such as Angela Ryan, Bob Wall and Roslyn Ross, among others, get the intellectual better of him.

It’s a shame Hamish Alcorn still has some pull at Webdiary because without him Webdiary would be a much better intellectual place where the likes of the warmongering right-wing Israeli Zionist supporters like Chris Parsons, Geoff Pahoff, Mike Lyvers, et al, can get their intellectual comeuppance and their Islamaphobic nonsense shot down in flames.

The lying, manipulating and rather childish Hamish Alcorn should step aside from Webdiary and let people who are willing to debate the woes of the world have complete freedom to have their say.

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About Me

is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
All material on this site is available for use without permission but it would be appreciated if the source is acknowledged.